Chapter Ten.
As I clung there in the mizzen-shroud, afraid to stir, hardly daring to breathe lest I should be heard, and puzzled beyond measure as to what it could all mean, but feeling all the same certain that something terrible had happened, and that it was no shipwreck, there was a tremendous kicking and banging at one of the cabin-doors, and up through the sky-light came in smothered tones—
“Here, open this, or I’ll kick it off the hinges.”
“Lie down!” yelled a sharp angry voice from somewhere beneath me, and there was a flash of a pistol, the loud report, and a few moments after the smell of the powder rose to my nostrils.
“Jarette,” I said to myself, as I recognised the half-French sailor’s voice, and then I felt sure that it was Mr Frewen who had shouted from one of the cabins where he must be locked in.
“Then it must be a mutiny,” I thought, and such a cold paralysing chill ran through me that I felt as if I should drop down on deck. For the recollection of all I had read of such affairs taking place in bygone times flashed through my brain—of officers murdered in cold blood, ships carried off by the crew to unknown islands, and—yes—I was an officer, young as I might be, and if the mutineers caught me they would murder me, as perhaps they had already murdered Captain Berriman and Mr Brymer.
I felt giddy then, and the wonder has always been to me that I did not let go and fall. But my fingers were well hooked on to the ropes, and there I hung listening, as after pretty well scouring the deck the men below me stopped, and the voice that I had set down as Jarette’s said—
“Well, have you got him?”